Thomas Renton Elliott

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Thomas Renton Elliott

Thomas Renton Elliott (born October 11, 1877 in Willington , County Durham , England, † March 4, 1961 in Broughton , Peeblesshire , Scotland) was a British doctor and physiologist . He was the first to suspect - in 1904 - that nerves influenced the cells downstream by releasing a chemical substance, in today's terminology a neurotransmitter . The idea initially went unnoticed. Elliott's pioneering role was only recognized after it was experimentally confirmed, especially by Henry Hallett Dale and Otto Loewi , who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this in 1936 .

Life

After attending school in Durham , Elliott studied science at Trinity College in Cambridge from 1896 to 1901 , probably with the idea of ​​later studying medicine. After the two-part Tripos exams in 1900 and 1901, he worked at the Cambridge Physiological Institute under John Newport Langley . It was here that the publications on the autonomic nervous system were made that later made him famous. At first, however, he met with indifference to skepticism, especially with Langley. This strengthened him, suspects Dale, who belonged to Trinity College for four years at the same time, in his original plan to become a clinically active doctor. To do this, he continued his medical studies at University College Hospital in London and became an assistant doctor there in 1910. During the First World War he was awarded military honors. In 1918 he married Martha McCosh, with whom he had five children. In those years the training of medical professionals in London was restructured and in 1918 Elliott received the first London Chair in Clinical Medicine. He was instrumental in the Medical Research Council founded in 1913 . He retired in 1939, but continued to advise scientific organizations and foundations such as the Wellcome Trust and the Beit Trust , which had supported him at the beginning of his clinical career.

plant

The discovery of a pharmacologically highly active substance in the adrenal glands - adrenaline - in 1894 had attracted a great deal of attention from biologists. The attention increased when it was noticed that adrenaline acted on some organs in a similar way to irritation of the sympathetic nerves. Langley was one of the researchers who looked into this in detail, and he passed the subject on to Elliott. His first major article, Volume 31 of the Journal of Physiology in 1904 , was about the transition point from the small intestine to the large intestine . In humans, the ileocecal valve there , but in cats, dogs and rabbits, as Eliott found, a muscle ring at the end of the small intestine prevents the contents of the intestine from passing backwards into the small intestine. Regarding the influence of the sympathetic and adrenaline, he found (from English): “Electrical stimulation of the sympathetic causes the muscle ring to contract, but the subsequent muscles of the small and large intestines relax. ... Adrenaline acts like a sympathetic stimulus, i.e. contraction of the muscle ring and relaxation of the neighboring intestinal sections. "

Three other publications appeared in the same volume in the Journal of Physiology . Elliott reported extensively on bowel movements in an even larger number of animal species: cats, dogs, rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, ferrets and hedgehogs. Again the sympathetic and adrenaline had the same effect. In a short message, he stated that both the sympathetic nervous system and adrenaline caused the urinary bladder of ferrets to contract. The visionary hypothesis is in the fourth publication from 1904, again a short message:

“Adrenaline does not excite sympathetic ganglia like nicotine does . His point of attack is more peripheral. ... I find that the smooth muscles of the dilatator pupillae respond to adrenaline even after complete denervation . So adrenaline does not excite any structure of the sympathetic nerves. ... Its site of action is perhaps on the smooth muscle cell, where it contacts the sympathetic nerves. The task of this site of action would be to receive and transform the nerve impulse. Adrenaline could then be the chemical stimulant that is released every time a nerve impulse arrives in the periphery. - Adrenalin might then be the chemical stimulant liberated on each occasion when the impulse arrives at the periphery. "

Several researchers had observed the correspondence between adrenaline and the sympathetic system. Elliott tried to explain it causally: Adrenaline is the transmitter substance released by the sympathetic nervous system - from the postganglionic sympathetic axons . In the short notice in the Journal of Physiology , Elliot formulated the hypothesis most succinctly. In his later work it remains indistinct, even seems to distance itself, for example in a 67-page article in the Journal of Physiology from 1905. There he lists assumptions about adrenaline, some in retrospect absurd, such as that adrenaline is an antibody against toxic metabolic products from the skeletal muscles ; or it is stored in the skeletal muscles and released from them when necessary to maintain blood pressure; or finally “the assumption that it serves to transmit sympathetic nerve impulses and that it is stored near the nerve-muscle contact points for this purpose. None of these assumptions is definitely refuted by what we know - The evidence does not conclusively disprove any of these <conjectures>. ”His idea here has become one of several“ not definitely to be excluded ”. The paper from 1905, on the other hand, shows again Elliott's intuition. When discussing the site of action of adrenaline, he writes (his terminology replaced by the current one):

" The specific reaction to adrenaline differentiates between, on the one hand, the nerve-muscle contacts of the sympathetic nerve and, on the other hand, the nerve-muscle contacts of the parasympathetic nerve and all synapses of the vegetative ganglia , which are biochemically Muscle contacts of the skeletal muscles are related. "

The biochemical difference was recognized over the course of the thirty years up to 1935 as the difference between nerve cells with noradrenaline as a transmitter on the one hand and nerve cells with acetylcholine as a transmitter on the other.

In a final, 79-page essay with experiments from Cambridge, on the innervation of the bladder and urethra , published in 1911, an observation was made during an operation at University College Hospital in London. Later publications no longer reached this level. Since then, instead of doing his own research, Elliott has been responsible for organizing and supervising research and teaching.

recognition

In 1913 Elliott became a member of the Royal Society , in 1947 Honorary Fellow of Trinity College.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ TR Elliott: On the innervation of the ileo-colic sphincter. In: The Journal of Physiology . 31, 1904, pp. 157-168, ISSN  0022-3751 . PMID 16992724 . PMC 1465573 (free full text). The translation adds.
  2. ^ TR Elliott and E. Barcley-Smith: Antiperistalsis and other muscular activities of the colon. In: The Journal of Physiology. 31, 1904, pp. 272-304, ISSN  0022-3751 . PMID 16992751 . PMC 1465587 (free full text).
  3. ↑ TR Elliott: The reaction of the ferrett's bladder to adrenalin. In: The Journal of Physiology 31, 1904, S. LIX. PMC 1465440 (free full text)
  4. ^ TR Elliott: On the action of adrenalin. In: The Journal of Physiology. 31, 1904, pp. XX-XX1. PMC 1465436 (free full text)
  5. ^ TR Elliott: The action of adrenalin. In: The Journal of Physiology. 32, 1904, pp. 401-467, ISSN  0022-3751 . PMID 16992786 . PMC 1465728 (free full text).
  6. ^ TR Elliott: The innervation of the bladder and urethra. In: The Journal of Physiology. 35, 1907, pp. 367-445, ISSN  0022-3751 . PMID 16992873 . PMC 1465829 (free full text).
personal data
SURNAME Elliott, Thomas Renton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British doctor and physiologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Willington , County Durham , England
DATE OF DEATH March 4, 1961
Place of death Broughton , Peeblesshire , Scotland